If you’ve read so far you’re unlikely to be Mr Painter. Or a ‘warmist’. Or a ‘believer’ in (catastrophic) climate change. By the way, according to “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” I am a ‘skeptic’ (together with 99% of humanity, as we have seen). I qualify under two categories:

“global temperatures are warming but a) the anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is over-stated […] compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots”

and

“it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be” and “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary”.

Rather, I think that urgent action on adaptation to current climate conditions is sorely needed. And no, I don’t think there is any conspiracy at work on the part of evil warmists. Never mind: as a skeptic, according to many people I shouldn’t be allowed to express my opinions. The mere existence of this very series of blog posts puts me on par with mass murderers and (according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, apparently) apartheid supporters. Is that too strong a concept? “No Pressure” videos of exploding children aside, I am the victim of an ongoing hate/cyber-bullying campaign by an Italian journalist writing for a national newspaper. Go figure.

James Painter […] said: ‘There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organisations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent.’

Poles Apart doesn’t nail the issue completely, but its broad conclusion may be familiar to many: “The weight of this study would suggest that, out of this wide range of factors, the presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate skepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed skeptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of skeptical voices in the print media of the USA and the UK.”

Espousing politicians, organised interests ‘feeding’ the skeptics, partisan media, USA and UK mostly. What would that mean, actually? As we have seen much is made by Mr Painter of Pat Michaels’ connections to the oil industry. Words aren’t spared to describe what might be funding some forms of climate skepticism. Then there is the mention of Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton.

Is it too much of a stretch then to interpret “Poles Apart” as trying to prove that the vast majority of climate change skepticism is a “crazy British toffs and American Republicans on the pay of Big Oil” thing?

That wouldn’t be journalism. Or would it? It depends.

What is journalism, at a time when “media ethics” is something broadcast live on a daily basis for the Leveson Inquiry “into the culture, practice and ethics of the press”? Is it about informing the public, and/or educating it? Is it about entertainment, eliciting readers to read by constantly diverting their attention? Or is journalism a form of activism, a way to push for the truth, perhaps a truth? This is what “Poles Apart”’s journalism-from-the-cage mostly risks looking like. And yet it wouldn’t have been too far to break the cage down. Mr Painter could have made up his mind about who is a skeptic and who isn’t, therefore abhorring any conflation. Take the point about the necessity of “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW”.

That is a point of policy, not just of science. What is the meaning of “substantial”? How many years have to pass before something is not “urgent”? And who would ever believe that all non-skeptics agree on exactly what action is needed? Or even if adaptation, getting ready to survive/resist climate events, should be more or less important than mitigation, cutting greenhouse gas emissions in order to lower the frequency of occurrence and/or strength of those climate events? Ms Nadin made it clear, during the launch event for “Poles Apart”, that there is a Chinese debate on adaptation. Are the people involved therein really to be categorised as skeptics?

As Mr Revkin said during the event, policy debates are legitimate. To remotely suggest otherwise, marking for example the GWPF as some kind of unquotable organisation on its way to ruin the planet because branded by the sin of libertarianism, is conspiratorial, therefore seldom serious. In fact, it is not difficult to find an alternative, non-conspiratorial, history-grounded explanation of the report’s results than “espousing politicians, organised interests ‘feeding’ the skeptics, and partisan media”. Consider the following:

For the UK and USA: at the launch event, debate chairman John Lloyd suggested at some point, that in the UK (and USA) there is a societal penchant for debate. Unfortunately, there is also the recently-established press tradition so nicely described by Nick Davies in “Flat Earth News”, i.e. the massive regurgitation of “wire copy and/or PR material”.

In Brazil: it might all be down to reporters too enamoured of scientific papers to question anything in them, and to explicit or implicit lobbying by those who would benefit from climate change mitigation policies:

(p66) “US media academic Myanna Lahsen who lives in Brazil says that ‘climate skepticism is hardly existent in the Brazilian media […]’. Another factor is that much of the coverage of science in the Brazilian media is driven by scientific papers appearing in Brazilian and international journals, where there is little space afforded to skeptical arguments”

(p69) “…sectors [of Brazil’s business elite] stand to gain from the continued pursuit of ambitious plans to further biofuel production, where Brazil is second only to the USA in volume of output”

Regarding China: Ms Nadin told the event’s audience something along the lines of the Chinese government having a strong position about AGW, a topic that is (therefore?) not politically contentious. But this may results in self-censorship and reporting following the party line, as per two examples from the report:

(p71) “skeptical discourses in China make a clear distinction between certain scientific findings, which they may question, and domestic policy statements, which they would not”

(p72) “Academic and other studies suggest that the volume of coverage of climate change increased substantially after the 2007 IPCC reports, often with official encouragement”

Regarding France: following Mr Sciama, one might be able to explain fully and in purely non-scientific terms the local embracing of mainstream climate change science, and the almost complete absence of skeptical voices from the media. From the report:

(p79) “France has a rationalist, engineer culture and people who have gone to engineer schools often end up in politics or influential positions. This entire social class of powerful engineer has links with the nuclear lobby. I would also say there is a tradition of respecting the science and not challenging the experts which is quite strong in France. This is probably why climate change was accepted very early”

At the event, Mr Sciama suggested the French revolution of 1789 as an additional factor, replacing aristocracy with “meritocracy” (perhaps a better word would be “technocracy”).

In India: according to “Poles Apart”, the media spectrum is actively occupied by organised believers in catastrophic AGW, literally pushing skeptics out of the way:

(p81) There have been two dominant narratives in the Indian media coverage of climate change…the dominance […] leaves scant room for climate skepticism

(p81) Part of the reason why [skeptical Indian] voices have not been heard much is the high profile of prominent individuals like Dr Pachauri and non-governmental organisations (such as the Center for Science and Environment, Greenpeace India, WWF India, or the Energy Research Institute). They have been vocal about the risks and impacts of man-made climate change and seem to have wielded a significant influence on climate reporting. They often enjoy close relationships with Indian environment reporters.

(p83) the voice of the climate change ‘believers’ is so strong that [Nitin Sethi, Special Correspondent for the Times of India] is wary of civil society and the 500 local and internationally affiliated NGOs he says there are in India which are pushing the government to do more on climate change.

In summary: in the UK/USA, prevalence of believers over skeptics might as well mean warmists are monopolising the press releases manipulating the media into shutting off all skeptics, whose voices are still heard (however faintly) mainly because of a long-standing freedom to report ‘both sides’.

In Brazil, nobody questions mainstream science. In China, skeptics will appear in newspapers as soon as the Communist Party will say they ought to appear. In France, the field is wholly occupied by technocrats, ie mindless (and anti-historical) followers of the latest mainstream science (it’s not by chance that Jules Romain, a French, wrote in 1923 the play “Dr Knock or The Triumph of Medicine”, where a whole village falls under the spell of a new local doctor, convincing them that to feel well is only the ignorant sensation of a sick person).

In India, the noise from climate change activists make skeptical idea inaudible. Is it possible to connect those dots now? Anybody else seeing a pattern, (relative) freedom to report on skepticism on one side, but forceful pushing on the journalists to avoid skeptics on the other? Could it be that Mr Painter and his fellow researchers have been measuring not the power of lobbies or partisan media, but (in the tiny amounts of skeptical voices allowed in print) flickering residual freedom of thought and speech, recalcitrance against being led by the nose by the latest bunch of experts, and willingness on the part of journalists to investigate rather than supinely doing as told?

If that were shown true, it would be truly ironic for the RISJ; they might have reported with “Poles Apart” a great story about journalism without even noticing. And it wouldn’t be the only story missed by Mr Painter and co-authors. Let’s go back to that one-of-two-skeptical-quote, by Dr Peiser of the GWPF:

(p4) “The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has been particularly successful in getting its views reported across most of the 10 UK newspapers. The two most quoted skeptics by far in the [Nov 2009-Feb 2010 Copenhagen/Climategate] period were Lord Lawson and Benny Peiser (more than 80 times between them) both from the GWPF”

Seems the GWPF has achieved the considerable success of getting at least a tiny part of its views reported by “Poles Apart” too! And that’s not all: the GWPF was founded a few months before the Copenhagen/Climategate period, so the fact that its most prominent representatives were “the two most quoted skeptic” by year’s end is a sign of remarkably speedy success. Alas (but not surprisingly), Mr Painter and co-authors seem to have missed that. Commenting on “Poles Apart”, Richard Black didn’t:

“Among other things, it shows the success that the the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has had in inserting itself into national discourse since its establishment in 2009 – a success noted this week by the conservativehome blog, which describes it as ‘one of the most important think-tanks in Britain today’”

Ironically, the GWPF found himself praised at the “Poles Apart” launch event, temporarily stealing the show thanks to two non-skeptic.

Mr Revkin agreed with Dr Peiser (who was in the attendance) about the importance of open and frank policy discussions, unencumbered by accusations of denial. According to Mr Revkin, a large problem in the US debate has been leftist (“progressive”?) politicians doing a disservice to a complex situation. He thinks that they have forced anthropogenic global warming into a “single sentence” containing both the issue (climate change) and the solution (emission reduction), thereby attempting to shut off everybody disagreeing on policy just like everybody disagreeing on science. That is of course absurd, non-democratic and unsustainable. As we have seen, even “Poles Apart” suffers a lot from such a conflation.

“with no clue on what they are forced to write about in the hope of getting the least likely reader to still read their articles; with communications strictly coming only from a single channel; unable to report good news, ignorant of science and pretending to be commenting football: well, climate change reporters live in a cage of their own making and the real miracle is when any one of them does report anything remotely non-biased on climate change”

Note that Mr Painter did mention, during his presentation at the launch event, that people are “confused about skepticism” because few recognise the range of different opinions among skeptics. But why! It takes only a few minutes of participation, even just of reading of popular skeptical sites such as Wattsupwiththat, Climate Audit, Real Science, Bishop Hill, The Reference Frame to understand “the full spectrum of climate skepticism”. The “confusion” can only arise from a forcibly-myopic view, merging the extreme diversity of opinions only by keeping oneself away from skeptics, and considering them from afar as some kind of amorphous evil group of abnormal people, monsters unable to express themselves properly, continuously trying to spread disinformation with the aim of ruining the planet.

Even Mr Painter appears to have woken up to the absurdity of such a concept only after Copenhagen (or Climategate). And yet the cage pervades “Poles Apart”. At times, it pushes the report to the hedge of ridicule, reminding of Stalinist pamphlets claiming Trotskyites were not Communist enough (or Catholic documents proclaiming Protestants as non-believers). Look at how Bjorn Lomborg gets included as an example of “climate skeptic” (p23), despite having written in his own FAQ:

“Q: Does Lomborg deny man-made global warming exists?
A: No. In Cool It he writes: “global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century” (p8).”

“Q: Does he believe we should do anything about global warming?
A: Yes. […] Lomborg also supports a CO 2 tax comparable with the central or high estimates of CO2 damages. That means an estimate in the range of $2-14 per ton of CO2 […] ”

What skeptic would include Lomborg among skeptics? It’s a concept that stretches the edges of reason. In the “Poles Apart” world where Bjorn-“global warming is real and man-made”-Lomborg gets branded as one of the bad guys and an exemplary one at that, one really has to wonder (a) who else would become a skeptic and (b) who’d ever be left out.

(p9) “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain”.

Another potential “Poles Apart skeptic”? Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts (!) at the Met Office, seen on the web providing arguments for those unconvinced that “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary”:

Even Geoffrey Lean’s words at the end of the report fall under “anthropogenic global warming is happening but a) it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be”:

(p115) All but the extremists on either side agree that the planet is warming that humanity is at least partly responsible – and that we don’t know how big its contribution is, or what the effects will be

So “Poles Apart” ends, with its own final quote potentially “skeptical”. Think that’s absurd enough? Think again. If we try to reconstruct who’s not a skeptic, by reversing the “Poles Apart” definition, we find only True Believers. A “climate change non-skeptic” is anybody convinced that:

Global temperatures are warming, and

The anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is not over-stated, compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots, and

It is known with enough certainty what the main causes are, and

It is known with enough certainty what the impacts will be, as climate models are adequate and no other doubt is relevant enough, and

Urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is necessary

Scientifically, it’s an untenable position: when there is no doubt, there is no science. It could make sense as a political stance, for an “extremist” party that is (as per Lean’s meaning of the word – see quote above). In any case, it is quite dangerous to mix the concept of ‘skepticism’ in policy and political matters. Shouldn’t people be free to disagree on one or more points without being labelled as ‘monsters’? Surely that’s something everybody agrees on (Chinese officials aside).

There is more unintended hilarity in the explanation given about the absence of climate change skeptics in the Brazilian media:

(p66) Brazilian journalists interviewed for this study also emphasised the strong journalistic culture of science and environment reporting which carried considerable weight within newspapers and other media outlets and strongly influenced their editorial line on climate skepticism

Of course they would, wouldn’t they? Classical scholars know the argument, it’s like Cicero writing “De domo sua”, about his own house. Nobody will speak badly about themselves. Quite the opposite: who will ever reply in an interview, “I’m sorry but we’re clueless about the science and just keep printing stuff from press releases”? Given also the fact that a few lines of text above, the Brazilian press is described as uninterested in global warming until five years ago:

(p65) There is some evidence for thinking that coverage of global warming and climate change in the Brazilian print media began to take off in the latter half of 2006

So much for “strong journalistic culture of science and environment reporting”. Another clear example of how distorted is Mr Painter’s view from within the cage, is the Appendix I of “Poles Apart”, dedicated to Climategate. All doubts on the six affair-related inquiries get assigned to skeptics, as if the author had given up on any possibility of serious investigation, an ironic situation for any journalist. Little wonder then if there are some inaccuracies.True, “Poles Apart” mentions the infamous words about “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” and includes some kind of attempt at explaining what the fuss was all about:

(p117) the UEA scientists explained that the ‘decline’ referred to a drop in temperatures inferred from the proxy analysis of tree rings, and that the ‘trick’ meant a graphic device to merge different sets of data from tree rings and thermometer readings

Note however the reader is told nothing about what the hiding was (just a “graphic device”? No: the outright removal of inconvenient data values, and the smoothing of the join between two different data sets). Also there is no hint about the actual underlying issue (the “divergence problem”), or its importance, both described by Andrew Montford in “The Climategate Inquiries”, a report for the GWPF published in 2010:

(p16-17) “The issue revolved around a tree ring series that had been used to reconstruct temperatures of the past […]. This series diverged dramatically from instrumental temperatures in the last half of the twentieth century, experiencing a sharp decline during a period when instrumental temperatures were rising. Showing this divergence would have raised a major question mark over the reliability of tree ring temperature reconstructions since, if there is a divergence between tree rings and instrumental records in modern times, it cannot be said with any certainty that such divergences did not also occur in the past, rendering the temperature reconstruction of questionable utility”

“Poles Apart” readers will get almost nothing of that. Furthermore, look at how Mr Painter describes Lord Oxburgh’s “Science Assessment Panel”, convened in the wake of Climategate:

(p117) “[the] independent [committee] commissioned by the UEA that focused on the science being done at CRU”

“The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit’s research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data”

“[…] as I [Lord Oxburgh] have pointed out to you previously the science was not the subject of our study”

And a lot could be said about the alleged “independence” of Lord Oxburgh’s “independent” panel (see “The Climategate Inquiries”, pp29-38).

These unfortunate cases of mistaken, partial and/or incomplete reporting will continue in Mr Painter’s and the RISJ output on climate change as long as texts written by skeptics will be considered anathema even as reading material, let alone source for quotes or information. “Poles Apart” is saturated of that attitude, and that makes the attentive reader wary of some of the material mentioned in it too. For example, a quote is taken from Naomi Oreskes and her book with Erik Conway “The Merchant of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”:

(p13) “[in the USA, the] divergence between the state of the science and how it was presented in the major media helped make it easy for our governament to do nothing about global warming”

“[Oreskes and Conway] miss a crucial point: the ingrained assumption that scientific evidence is the only authority that can justify policy action — scientism — is what renders both policy and its supporting science vulnerable to the dogmatic amplification of doubt.”

More: a rather inordinate outburst by Robin McKie of the Observer is given pride of place:

(p14) “Only a handful of truly reputable scientists are skeptical about the link between global warming and our industrial activities. More to the point, that minority is given a vastly disproportionate amount of publicity. Note the same old faces – the Lawsons and Moncktons – who are trotted out to speak on Newsnight or Channel 4 News whenever climate change is debated.”

That quote is from a public exchange between McKie and Benny Peiser, Director of the GWPF, in The Observer in the wake of Climategate and United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. “Poles Apart” does contain some of the text written on the occasion by Peiser too. This might be one of two or three direct quotes of words written by somebody considered a skeptic, in the whole report (note however, it contains nothing about climate change skepticism):

There are two problems with that. First of all, it is rather unfortunate that the one quote by a UK-based “skeptic”, is singularly buried in the text, rather than highlighted as every other quote as a block, with indented left and right margins. Only the most careful readers will not miss it.

More importantly, Peiser was talking about “inflated climate alarm” but McKie tried to shift the discussion to a “link between global warming and our industrial activity” – the existence of which does not imply the necessity to raise climate change alarms. Again in this case, “Poles Apart” seems to have conflated together all criticisms of mainstream climate change thinking into a single group.

After all: if few have so far defined what they mean by “climate change skepticism” (as noted by Andy Revkin); and few have recognised that there are several kinds of it (as noted by “Poles Apart” author James Painter); therefore, much of the existing literature on climate change skepticism and the media (or anything else) should be taken with the classical grain of salt.

Rather differently than Isaac Newton, Dr Painter might have found himself not on the shoulder of giants, but under the boots of minions. And that would explain the acceptance of the sloppy shorthand form, “climate skepticism” (rather than “climate CHANGE skepticism”). Unless that is, there is something else at work.

It is glaring, because the ultimate subject of the study doesn’t make almost any first-hand appearance, in a sea of ultimately unreliable hearsays. “Poles Apart” at times reads like a LGBT study written without any LGBT author or interviewee: so much for “agnosticism”.

It is paradoxical, because it further removes academic value from the report. Had skeptics been involved, truly “Poles Apart” would have been groundbreaking: alongside a definition of skepticism and a recognition of the diversity among skeptics, it would have included even a treatment of skeptics as normal human beings deserving attention, instead of monsters (note that there is a quote from Benny Peiser of the GWPF at page 14 – but blink and you’ll miss it; more on that later).

And what it is telling? The attempt of writing about skepticism without listening to skeptics shows the conditions under which the report has been written. We have already seen how Mr Painter’s warmist stance managed to have a large negative impact on his insightful observation that there are several kinds of skepticism. There are two further and complementary aspects to that: the excessive (almost, tragic) trust put in dubious (and always warmist) sources, and the determined effort to lock oneself in a warmist cage in order to keep skeptics away.

Having to rush through his opening presentation at the launch event of “Poles Apart” in order to make time for Mr Revkin, who had to leave relatively early, Mr Painter still made sure the audience would know the report had been built upon a large number of academic works in the field of climate change and the media. This is of course very important to provide “Poles Apart” with a “firmer footing” than a purely anecdotal approach. However, it also means that very same footing is weakened by the uncritical acceptance of dubious sources.

Of course it has been known for a while that Prof Jones’ contribution to the BBC impartiality and accuracy was anything but. The very review document’s PDF had to be modified a few days after publication to sport the following text at page 2:

“On 8 August 2011 the Trust published an updated version of Professor Steve Jones’ independent review of the accuracy and impartiality of the BBC’s science coverage due to an ambiguity in the section on climate change. This reference was in the section on pages 71-72, immediately before Professor Jones discussed statements about climate change contained in two BBC programmes. The Trust and Professor Jones now recognise that the passage as originally published could be interpreted as attributing statements made in those two programmes to Lord Lawson or to Lord Monckton. Neither programme specifically featured Lord Lawson or Lord Monckton and it was not Professor Jones’ intention to suggest that this was the case. Professor Jones has apologised for the lack of clarity in this section of his assessment, which has now been amended.”

To this day, it is not know to whom to attribute those “statements”. Perhaps less known is the fact that Professor Jones’ inaccuracies don’t stop with the good Lords. From page 72 of the “Independent Assessment”:

“A submission made to this Review by Andrew Montford and Tony Newbery (both active in the anti‐global‐warming movement, and the former the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science) devotes much of its content to criticising not the data on temperatures but the membership of a BBC seminar on the topic in 2006, and to a lengthy discussion as to whether its Environment Analyst was carrying out BBC duties or acting as a freelance during an environment programme at Cambridge University. The factual argument, even for activists, appears to be largely over but parts of the BBC are taking a long time to notice.”

“Readers may remember that Tony Newbery (of Harmless Sky) and I made a submission to the review. In it we demonstrated that the BBC Trust had misled the public over a seminar discussing climate change coverage back in 2006.”

“can anyone explain to me why Andrew and I might choose to write about the global temperature record to a geneticist who is conducting a review of journalism for a broadcaster? Apparently Professor Jones thinks that is what we should have done. And he also seems to think that because we didn’t do this, we must think that the debate about the science of climate change is over. That is just plain silly.

In fact we wrote to Professor Jones providing evidence, and I do mean evidence, that the BBC’s news gathering operation had become far too close to environmental activism and environmental activists to be able to report climate change impartially or accurately (here). That criticism is clearly material to his report, and his failure to address the issues we raised says far more about the rigour with which he has conducted his review than it does about our views on the science of climate change, which are in any case irrelevant to his review.”

Did Professor Jones actually read, let alone strove to understand Montford and Newbery’s submission? That doesn’t look likely. By the way, they were not granted a correction. The fact that they are not Lords of the Land has obviously nothing to do with that.

Speaking immediately after Professor Jones at the “Poles Apart” launch event, I myself did wonder loudly if we were inhabiting the same universe. Has the BBC ever invited anybody to discuss 2+2=5? Of course not. What one finds on the airwaves and in the website is a Corporation encouraging a WWF activist to campaign on live radio during a recent broadcasting of Radio4’s flagship Today programme; and being obsessed with global warming to the point of inserting tips on how to organise a climate change conference in his Italian language course of all places (see my blog post: “Yes, John: Steve Jones Is Wrong And The BBC Totally Unbalanced On Climate Change”, Nov 11).

Perhaps Professor Jones does consider any question improper, even the pretend ones asked at the Today programme. Things have been progressing though: as if it were at all possible, the situation is now getting even worse for the BBC “impartiality”, “accuracy” and Professor Jones’ “2+2=5” argument, with the news that some TV and radio programmes might have been surreptitiously sponsored by activist organisations and companies with vested interests in pushing forward a “warmist” agenda on climate change. See here.

“Part of the news process means being wrong some of the time. Joe Romm is never wrong.”

Quoting Romm about climate change should be avoided if the topic is not caricature. It is equivalent to quoting a six-day creationist about the Book of Genesis, and just as informative. Likewise, “Poles Apart” refers an inordinate amount of times to a book where an environmental scientist (Dr Haydn Washington) and a cartoonist/blogger (John Cook) insanely describe skepticism as a sociopathological trait (“Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand”). In fact the problem is not so much citing from this or that source, but the amount of trust put in them. Skepticism, obviously, is very much needed also when gathering for information. The Joe Romms of the world may even be interesting, insightful, provocative, and worthy of being read and quoted at will. But anybody taking their words as “right” will find themselves in danger of being led astray.

This applies to the very same New York Times where Mr Revkin still takes care of the DotEarth blog. “Poles Apart” quotes from Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review:

(p90) “It’s not simple ideology: it’s more that the [New York] Times is not blinded by ideology”

Attentive readers might disagree. At the beginning of March 2010, an article by John M Broder appeared in the front page of the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. The article was titled “Feeling the heat from critics, climate scientists battle back” and it was a first attempt by the NYT to do some analysis on Climategate (an ‘affair’ that was four months old at the time already).

Uniquely in the history of the IHT (whose articles usually follow the US edition, appearing on paper a day after they’ve been written and published on the website), Broder’s article was nowhere to be seen at nytimes.com until the early AM GMT hours of March 3. As I reported on my blog the following day:

“Tellingly, the structure has been heavily changed, and the interviewees as well. I have had a series of e-mail exchanges with Mr Broder today and won’t report any of them. The impression remains that some Editor at the NYT panicked after reading the IHT version, and got Mr Broder or some sub-editor to rewrite it almost from scratch to eliminate some inconvenient names and acquire warmist respectability by giving the concluding remarks to Gavin Schmidt. All in all, it has been an episode wholly consistent with an atmosphere of climate bullying at the NYT.”

An important point to make is that neither version of Mr Broder’s article looked remotely “skeptical” on climate change, so this is not an episode of censorship. Rather, it is further evidence of the New York Times being “blinded by ideology” on climate-related pieces, so that the original quote by Judith Curry on Broder’s piece for example had to be excised and the article purified further (in the “warmist” direction, of course). To see how debasing this has become for the climate sections of the newspaper, have a look at Souren Melikian’s wonderful, questioning, informative, challenging, no-holds-barred IHT articles on the art market.

Sadly, self-blinding by ideology is seldom the result of a conscious process. Mr Painter may have done just as much in “Poles Apart”. In Appendix 3 we are told:

(p123) “the search engines came up with significant numbers of articles where the key word ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ were mentioned briefly at the start but where not the main focus [or] the article was not about either of these topics. […] We decided to keep these in the sample ”

and

(p123) “an opinion piece could be skeptical in tone about global warming/climate change, or the need to take measures to combat it, but include no mention or quoting of skeptical voices. These were generally excluded”

How strange…non-skeptics get included no matter who’s mentioned, skeptics get excluded unless somebody else is mentioned. As if there truly were too many skeptical voices to choose from. One has to wonder why no author noticed the end result, a zero count for “skeptical editorials” in all countries and newspapers (see table 4.1, lines 20/21 at page 56).

This is equivalent to building a cage for oneself, safe inside away from the words of those nasty, evil, monstrous skeptics.

“[“Poles Apart”] can’t be considered a truly comprehensive global snapshot in that it’s looked at only six countries, albeit important ones…this is a toe-dip into media coverage rather than a comprehensive survey.”

“Toe-dip”? Indeed, “Poles Apart” is not academic, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But this also means it is more akin to a collection of impressions and anecdotes informed by academic studies and datasets, than to a scientific work. And this is a problem: as everybody who is active in the climate change discourse surely and painfully knows, there cannot be much understanding of the real world without science. A point sadly lost on Leo Hickman of the Guardian, again commenting on “Poles Apart”:

“…a hunch I have long believed to carry some substance: climate skepticism is a predominantly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Or, rather, it is a phenomenon that tends to gets amplified to a much greater extent in the various English-language media outlets around the world – particularly, in the US, UK and Australia – than it does in other languages or countries. Until now, there has been very little beyond the anecdotal to support this theory. But the proposition is now on a firmer footing thanks to a new report…”

Hickman is wrong on multiple fronts, and “Poles Apart” will leave him confused, worse, incorrectly sure about the still-unknowable.

If one wanted to really look into English-language media, there’s much more than climate skepticism that tends to get amplified. Take the Daily Mail, reported in “Poles Apart” as providing space to skeptics but very much on the warmist side until the end of 2009 at least: to the point of publishing a fantasy-based article about drowning polar bears, loosely based on some actual sightings (of non-drowning polar bears). The article was reprised and the fantasy amplified further (!!!) in the Italian media at the time, as documented at my Sep 3, 2008 blog post “Polar Bears: Has the Daily Mail Just Pulled a Deceiving Article?”.

Scientifically speaking, the anecdotal nature of “Poles Apart” is just one of the potential ‘confounding factors’, that is, the missing or not sufficiently explored details that might have misled Mr Painter and colleagues in their analysis. In fact, the UK overreaction to past climate change scares should have been investigated in “Poles Apart”, but wasn’t, leaving a gaping hole, even if Brazilian journalist Claudio Angelo is quoted as saying:

(p67) [Brazilian daily newspaper] Folha underreported ‘Climategate’, partly to resist the media frenzy created in the UK around the affair, and partly because Brazil has never hyped climate change the way the British press did, with a lot of doom-and-gloom stories.

Other ‘confounding factors’:

Are ‘skeptics’ truly and fully represented by the four categories used in “Poles Apart”?

What exactly is represented in the media included in the research? Mr Revkin told the launch event audience that he left journalism to work on “fostering innovation”. Minutes later, Yves Sciama said “I’m a science reporter” after an audience member had reminded everybody that climate change should better be described as an issue not of science, rather about the political economy of energy generation, distribution and consumption.

How many of the articles in the analysis were based on ‘churnalism’, the almost wholesale dressing up of news agency and press release copy as original articles, a problem very much present across the world and definitely in the UK media, and a problem mentioned in passing in “Poles Apart”?

In the Anglo-Saxon vs. Rest-of-the-World differences about Climategate, what was the contribution of the fact that 100% of the Climategate material was in English and most of it included British and American scientists?

Is there any other running difference between the media in the UK and USA compared to the other nations involved in the analysis, for example linked to ownership structure?

Was the reported change in coverage of climate change skepticism accompanied by changes in public opinion? If yes, which change led, and which one followed? And how does the situation about climate change compare to other scientific and/or political topics?

Is there any link between prevalence of skeptical voices and the realisation that certain parts of the world are expected to have to pay for mitigation and adaptation, and others to receive funding instead?

These are all questions to answers before reaching an academic level, before having scientific conclusions, i.e. before being able to draw conclusions at all.

There is one aspect we can investigate further. Chapter 2 of “Poles Apart”, “The Nature of Climate skepticism” is 18 pages long and still the first skeptic mentioned in there is after four-and-a-half pages (Pat Michaels). Among the first things we learn, his “about 40 per cent” funding from “oil industry sources”. No other quotes by Michaels are provided, and there is no description of what he is skeptical about. A little more can be had with Steve McIntyre, whose voluminous blog Climate Audit is mentioned but not quoted (a description of McIntyre’s “skepticism” is taken from “one US magazine”). This means statements like the one below (from Climate Audit’s Jan 5, 2006 entry) are literally invisible to the “Poles Apart” authors:

“As I often repeat, I [Steve McIntyre] am not a “contrarian”. If I were a politician and forced to make a decision on climate policy in the next 10 minutes, I would be guided by the IPCC and the various learned societies that I so often criticize.”

Lord Monckton? Readers of “Poles Apart” learn of his “anti-communist ideology” before everything else. No quote by him either. Finally, Bjorn Lomborg. Guess what? No quote by the Danish scientist. The chapter about skepticism chugs along with a single direct quote by a non-warmist, “Joe Bast, the head of climate skeptic Heartland Institute” but his printed words (to Nature magazine) are not about skeptical propositions:

(p25) “The left has no reason to look under the hood of global warming […] The right does, and that’s what happened”

No much luck in the rest of the chapter with Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Ian Plimer, etc etc. We have already seen that the Bibliography points to a single skeptical work, in French. What was then the effect on the “Poles Apart” analysis of having it done without any skeptic either among the authors or interviewees?

A major problem in the “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” report is an apparent, underlying inconsistency driven by the unshaken belief that there is something wrong in being a climate change skeptic of any sort. The authors’ relentlessly “warmist” opinions result in the undermining of what could have been a great attempt at clarifying what climate change skepticism actually is.

This all starts with quite a strong claim, early on in the report:

(p14) “This study has been prompted by these important [climate change] debates but it is largely agnostic about them. It is not its purpose to criticise climate skeptics.”

Is that so? Mr Painter is not new to climate-related work and his past activity reveals a clear stance on the science, policy and politics of climate change. Exactly a year ago Mr Painter published for the RISJ another report, aptly and self-consciously titled “Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at Copenhagen and Beyond” with a main web page describing him:

“Mr Painter is the head of the Journalism Fellowship Programme at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He worked for several years at the BBC World Service in various capacities including Americas Executive editor, head of the Spanish American Service and head of the BBC Miami office. He has written extensively on climate change, the media and Latin America for several organisations and publications, including the BBC, the UNDP, Oxfam and Oxford Analytica. He is the author of several books on Latin America, and of the RISJ challenge, Counter-Hegemonic News: A case study of Al-Jazeera English and Telesur.”

BBC, UNDP, Oxfam, Oxford Analytica, and now the British Council, hardly hotbeds of skepticism, In fact the “Summoned by Science” report contains a revealing phraseology such as:

(p9) “A more science-based series of reports […] released in the months running up to Copenhagen suggested […] the need for an ambitious and binding deal was made all the more urgent by the latest science”

(p10) “it was not just the heads of state, but journalists too who had been summoned to Copenhagen by the urgency of the climate science”

(p88) “The phenomenon of extreme climatic events around the world in 2010 suggests that reporting people’s experience of the weather will become more pressing an issue. Separate data from the NOAA and NASA published in July 2010 found that the first half of the year was the warmest on record globally. Seventeen countries – including Pakistan which registered a record temperature of 53.5C – have experienced record-breaking high temperatures. As Peter Stott of the UK Met Office explained, ‘the evidence is so clear the chance there’s something we haven’t thought of [that could be warming the climate the other than GHGs] seems to be getting smaller and smaller’.”

(p1) “in the last 18 months I have been lucky enough to travel to parts of the world on the front line of the impact of global warming. These have included Indonesia, Greenland, Vietnam where sea level rises threaten catastrophic economic effects, and Bolivia and Peru where the melting glaciers raise very serious concerns over future freshwater supplies in the dry season”

(p3) “One respected research group is now predicting ice-free summers by 2013”

(p4) “We know that after 10,000 years of relatively stable temperatures, global warming has caused the Amazon region to increase in temperature by about a quarter of a degree C per decade since 1975”

Mr Painter’s attitude in matters of climate change doesn’t remotely reminds of skepticism and is clear throughout the “Poles Apart” report. For example the Climategate “affair” is referred at page 14 to Fred Pearce’s “The Climate Files” and an “unpublished manuscript” by a Myanna Lahsen, with no mention of very-much-published books, Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science” or of (non-skeptic) Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller’s “Climategate: The CRUtape Letters”. The Bibliography refers also to Greenpeace but includes only a single “skeptic” piece, in French by Claude Allègre. And the whole report seemingly assumes the curious opinion that everything ‘skeptic’ is necessarily lacking legitimacy, as implied in Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard’s quote from page 39, where climate (change) skepticism becomes the opposite of ‘straight reporting’ of science:

(p39) “Overall I would say that coverage of climate skepticism is a relatively minor problem. […] Almost all the US newspapers now report the science straight; they just don’t cover it prominently or enough”

Near the end of the report, Mr Painter goes further, linking climate change skepticism to “anti-science sentiments”. Note the figure of speech: ‘anti-science’ plus ‘sentiment’, in other words, skepticism as ‘twice irrational’:

(p113) “The way in which climate skepticism feeds into, and is a manifestation of, wider anti-science sentiments both within a newspaper and wider society is just one area with needs further research”

As common in works of a much lower quality than “Poles Apart”, suggestions about some evil monstrosity lurking behind skepticism are not far from the surface. Look at the case of Nitin Sethi, a special correspondent for the Times of India. Try as he might, Mr Sethi admits he can’t find nefarious skeptic puppeteers, actually is convinced there is little coordination among skeptics, versus a giant organised pushing by “climate change ‘believers‘”. Never mind, that baseless initial fear of skeptics being funded by or affiliated to the devil or thereby, is deemed enough to shut off all “skeptical voices” (my emphasis):

(p83) [Nitin Sethi] says he has found about 8-10 articles in scientific journals carrying skeptical voices, but he has been ‘skeptical about picking them up. My first question has been to ask if I can find their sources of funding or affiliation’. Finally [he] says he is not aware of any coordinate lobbying attempts by skeptics in India. On the contrary, he says the voice of the climate change ‘believers’ is so strong that he is wary of civil society and the 500 local and internationally affiliated NGOs he says there are in India which are pushing the government to do more on climate change.

“Poles Apart” gives further credence to the ‘skeptics-as-evil-monsters’ idea by pointing readers (page 114, note 256) to Tom Yulsman’s Copenhagen-era “7 Tips for Covering Climate Change”, that includes the conspiratorial invitation to

“Understand and distinguish between legitimate analyses and what Eric Pooley calls ‘weapons of mass persuasion’”

For some reason, the “Poles Apart” authors don’t connect ‘mass persuasion‘ to Nithin Seti’s NGOs. Another example of skepticism as abomination is in the words of Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey, lamenting the concept as having been somehow stolen:

(p17) “skepticism is a major part of science. and it’s a shame it has been appropriated. […] If we could reclaim the word, that would be progress”

Finally, Mr Painter’s work for the report has been sponsored by the British Council. Sponsorship is seldom a problem, but it means having to work very hard before being able to claim “agnosticism” on any topic. The sponsor, in fact, is not agnostic at all, as per the British Council’s “Climate Change” web page:

“The evidence is clear: human activity is dramatically altering the environment of the very world we live in. Through deforestation and burning fossil fuels, our actions are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the land, sea and air. Climate change affects us all and it’s taking place on a global and local scale.”

“made up of a series of projects which focus on different parts of society, on differing communities, in order to provide an understanding of climate change throughout society, not just within the scientific and political communities”

“Climate change will remain an important part of the content of our core programmes in the arts, English, education and society around the world. Apart from climate change being a critical issue in its own right, it also captures the imagination of young people and stimulates international debate. Our work is part of the UK’s commitment to tackling climate change”

Just like it would be difficult to imagine the British Council sponsoring a report that would undermine all that climate change effort, it is therefore also difficult to believe “Poles Apart” to be “agnostic” about climate change “skepticism”. This appears clearly also in one of Mr Painter’s most important points, the understanding that there is more than one kind of climate change “skepticism”.

(p114) “This study has gone to some lengths to describe the full spectrum of climate skepticism. This is because we think, like many other commentators, that it is the role of good journalism to differentiate between the types of skepticism”

Andy Revkin, former environment correspondent at The New York Times and well-known climate blogger, praised “Poles Apart” on this point at the launch event. Notably, Mr Painter had figured out as much in the 2010 “Summoned by Science” report:

(p78) “there are serious and well-informed bloggers who are not driven by political ideologies or by money from the fossil fuel lobby. The blogosphere may be ‘impure’ compared to the peer-review process but it clearly demands openness and access to data that were absent in the preinternet days. And it is here to stay.”

Unfortunately, the importance of such a realisation does not reverberate throughout the “Poles Apart” report: readers are treated to repeated attempts at conflating all skeptics together, and ”skeptic” and “denier” remain frustratingly interchangeable. For example in Appendix 4 the list of “skeptics” does not contain any category, conflating US politician Joe Barton, scientist John Christy, UK politician Lord Nigel Lawson and TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh all ending up under a single, giant umbrella.

Another example concerns what is described in the report as the “methodology commonly applied” in academic studies of climate change in the media (p36), where four categories of newspaper articles are described as those that:

“present the viewpoint that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) accounts for all climate changes

give a ‘balanced account’ surrounding the existence and non-existence of AGW

present multiple viewpoints but emphasise the claim that the anthropogenic component contributes negligibly to changes in the climate”

According to Mr Painter though, “Category (4) is where skeptic, denialist, or contrarian views would be most represented.” This is in contradiction to “Poles Apart”’s definition of “skeptic” reported above.

The problem continues when “Poles Apart” turns to politics:

(p112) “The view that climate skepticism is mainly a feature of a certain narrow strand of conservative ideology (libertarian and strongly free-market) may also help to explain the situation in the USA […] This is also one factor explaining the absence of persistent climate-skeptic voices in the media in Brazil, France, and India”

However, during the launch event Mr Revkin did make the point that US TV networks are fairly “progressive” (his word) on the topic of climate change. On the other hand, this is not mirrored by a large “progressive” majority in the population. It is also not clear how many libertarians in social and economic matters would describe themselves as “conservative” (as if there were too much freedom to preserve). But again, how could any of that accommodate for all people with opinions ranging from “global temperatures are not warming” to “anthropogenic global warming is happening but urgent action by governments to counter AGW is not necessary”?

The report authors seem to be moving back and fro on who actually qualifies as “skeptic”. And so whilst the recognition of the variety of skeptical positions rises “Poles Apart” above many undignified, low-quality polemics against “climate change denialists”, it almost looks as if parts of report have been written by somebody unaware of the existence of that very same point. It’s a confusion that could have been easily avoided.

“This is a wide-ranging comparative study about the prevalence of climate skeptic voices in the print media in six countries: Brazil, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.”

That is the opening line of “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” a report written by a team of researchers headed by James Painter for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and the British Council; and a great example of all that is strange with contemporary (climate-mainstream) journalism: a mix of the sublime and of the much-less-than-sublime, where great insights and surprisingly clear expositions have to coexist with stunning simplifications, abysmal naïvetés and incredibly one-sided analyses fed by an almost existential neglect of a large chunk of reality.

Hosted by the British Council in London on November 10, 2011 (live microblogging here), the launch event for “Poles Apart” saw Mr Painter accompanied by a panel composed by Rebecca Nadin, author of the China section of the report; Yves Sciama, French science/environment journalist and author; and (via internet videoconference) Andy Revkin, former environment journalist at the New York Times where he still manages the “Dot Earth” blog. The panel chair was John Lloyd, well-known journalist and Director of Journalism at the RISJ.

The effort behind “Poles Apart” has been truly remarkable, with an analysis of almost 5,000 newspaper articles, taken “in most countries” from “ an example of a left-leaning and a right-leaning newspaper”. This is because the authors:

“were also interested in exploring whether there was a correspondence between the prevalence of skeptical voices and the political leaning of a newspaper”

Results roughly followed along the same line, at least in some countries. According to the press release accompanying “Poles Apart”:

“the researchers discovered a link between the amount of coverage given to climate skeptics and the political viewpoint of newspaper titles in the UK and the US”

However

“this link did not appear in the other study countries – Brazil, France and India”

Mr Painter summarised in the press release the report conclusions about what is behind the differences:

“There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organisations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent”

Remarkably, “Poles Apart” recognizes there are several forms of climate skepticism. It even contains a varied definition of “skeptic”, as somebody holding one or more of the following views (see Appendix 2, item 8, page 121 in the report)

global temperatures are not warming

global temperatures are warming but a) the anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is over-stated, negligible, or non-existent compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots or b) it is not known with any or enough certainty what the main causes are

anthropogenic global warming is happening but a) it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be, due to inadequacies of climate modelling or other doubts; b) urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary

However, for reasons that are never made clear, the six categories are often conflated throughout the report, and skepticism in one or more aspects of climate change is short-handed into a meaningless phrasing, “climate skepticism”. And rather strangely, “Poles apart” closes with a quote by “veteran British environmental journalist Geoffrey Lean”, somehow throwing in the air the whole idea of the relevance of a focus on “skeptical voices”:

“We should be debating not scientific certainty, but risk – or more precisely, what levels of risk we are prepared to take with the futures of our children and grandchildren”

That’s one of several instances where “Poles Apart” comes close to undermining its own raison d’être.